Top House Democrat Calls for US-China AI Treaty Amid Incident Concerns

As President Donald Trump prepares for discussions with tech and AI CEOs in Washington, a prominent voice from Capitol Hill, Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA), is advocating for a critical treaty between the United States and China. The proposed agreement aims to establish safeguards that would prevent artificial intelligence from causing global instability and widespread disruption. However, the endeavor to unite leaders from both nations in taking such decisive action is widely considered a significant challenge. In a series of letters obtained exclusively by The Verge, Khanna, who serves as the top Democrat on the House Select Committee on China and is also seen as a potential future presidential candidate, has directly questioned both a key U.S. intelligence agency and several leading Chinese AI companies. His inquiries focused on their readiness to respond to a major AI-related incident, drawing parallels to the recent "OpenAI agents' hack of Hugging Face" that occurred this past summer. Among the Chinese AI firms specifically addressed in Khanna's letters were DeepSeek, Alibaba, and Moonshot AI. These companies, along with others in the rapidly evolving AI sector, are being pressed to outline their protocols and preparedness strategies for mitigating risks associated with advanced AI systems. Khanna's initiative underscores growing concerns within the U.S. government regarding the potential for AI technologies to be misused or to malfunction with severe consequences, emphasizing the urgent need for international cooperation and robust incident response frameworks.